Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Tuesday, March 05, 2019

Dead Letters

Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion
in New Zealand 1914–1920

By Jared Davidson

RRP $35, Release Date 1 March
2019, Otago University Press

If we are tempted to think of
threats to privacy as solely problems of the digital age, we should think
again. Dead Letters: Censorship and subversion in New Zealand 1914–1920 is
a startling reminder that we have been here before.

In 1918, from deep within the
West Coast bush, a miner on the run from the military wrote a letter to his
sweetheart. Two months later he was in jail. Like millions of others, his
letter had been steamed open by a team of censors shrouded in secrecy. Using
their confiscated mail as a starting point, Dead Letters looks at the
lives of people caught in the web of wartime surveillance.

Among them were a feisty
German-born socialist, a Norwegian watersider, an affectionate Irish
nationalist, a love-struck miner, an aspiring Maxim Gorky, a cross-dressing
doctor, a nameless rural labourer, an avid letter writer with a hatred of war,
and two mystical dairy farmers with a poetic bent. Military censorship within
New Zealand meant that their letters were stopped, confiscated and then filed
away, sealed and unread for over 100 years. Until now.

The letters under discussion
are anything but dead. Revelling in the texture, the handwriting, the smell,
the very tangible form of the surviving correspondence, Dead Letters conveys
the thrill of discovery as well as the indignity of injustice.

In telling the history of
the letters’ authors and addressees, alongside the context in which correspondence
was conducted, the chapters unfold an extraordinary, sometimes tragic,
sometimes farcical, often funny insight into who and what it was that
challenged police and defence authorities.

— Charlotte Macdonald,
historian

These intercepted letters reveal
dark and wonderful corners of New Zealand history. Davidson has done a superb
job of rescuing long-suppressed voices from official oblivion.

— Mark Derby, historian

An archivist
by day and labour historian by night, Jared Davidson is an award-winning writer
based in Wellington. He is the author of Remains to Be Seen and Sewing
Freedom, a curator of the exhibition He Tohu, and an active committee
member of the Labour History Project. Through social biography and history from
below, Jared explores the lives of people often overlooked by traditional
histories – from working-class radicals of the early twentieth century to
prison convicts of the nineteenth.